Freelance Writer

Monthly Archives: November 2016

I am about to describe a movie that, to the best of my knowledge, no one but I, my husband, and a handful of film critics ever saw. This film has no online presence and received no DVD release. Its official website is long gone, though it does retain a Wikipedia article, which cites it as the lowest grossing film of all time.

Also, the trailer is still on YouTube.

When I sneaked into Proud American eight years ago as a joke, I had no idea my brain would one day become the primary record of its existence. At the time, I just wanted to have a giggle at the most naked, artless piece of propaganda to hit theaters since World War II. Produced by Hallmark and financed by Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, and American Airlines, Proud American is ostensibly five intertwining stories about Americans making good. In actuality, though, it’s a hyper-capitalist nightmare. If a corporate lobbyist and a Fox News commentator had a love child, and that love child had a wet dream, and the fluid products of that wet dream were pressed into celluloid and run through a film projector, this is what you would get.

Given the recent resurgence of nationalist feelings in the United States, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit this lunacy. Keep in mind, however, that I saw it exactly once back in 2008 and am thus describing it from long-decayed memory. Keep in mind also that there are practically no screen shots online, so I’ve made some crappily Photoshopped approximations of what I think I saw all those summers ago.Continue reading →